


The Mob Song

by MagitekUnit05953234



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Angst, Fluff, Human Experimentation, M/M, MT Prompto Argentum, Post-Episode Ignis Verse 2, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Promnis Big Bang 2019, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-01-26 14:29:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21375631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagitekUnit05953234/pseuds/MagitekUnit05953234
Summary: “Something tells me you shouldn’t be here, pretty boy,” the daemon —an arachne type— steps into the room and leans casually against the doorframe. “What’s a guy like you doing in a place like this?”
Relationships: Prompto Argentum/Ignis Scientia
Comments: 13
Kudos: 133
Collections: 2019 Promnis Big Bang





	The Mob Song

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of Promnis Big Bang 2019! I was part of a team with [NekoAisu](https://twitter.com/FlamingAceKiri) as my editor and [Niscuit-Gravy](https://twitter.com/NiscuitG) as the accompanying artist. I had a great time working with them and am incredibly excited to be able to share our work with you!

Ignis becomes aware, quite suddenly, that there is a smear of red paint dried and flaking on the side of his left wrist. He blinks at it, staring at the acrylic pinning the fair, vellus hairs to his skin, turning over Noctis’s declaration over and over in his mind. “I’m sorry?”

“I’m putting you on mandatory leave,” Noctis repeats. He sips at his hot chocolate through a lime green silly straw dunked into the misshapen clay mug Gladio gifted him last Frost Festival. “You haven’t had a day off in… how long has it been since we took back the city? Three years, now?”

“I took a week off nine months ago.”

“Only because you were so drugged up after breaking your leg you were unconscious for, like, three days of it,” Noctis finishes his hot chocolate, frowning as his straw sucks in nothing but air. “You need a real break. Two months, no work. You’re practically running the world for me and that’s a lot, so… I’m putting you on leave starting now.”

“Noct—”

“No arguing,” Noct grins. “Royal decree.”

⊶⊷

It takes two days for Ignis to find something properly productive to do that won’t register as being so until it’s too late to stop. There is only so long he can sit idle, painting the skyline and listening to the radio, before he’ll lose his mind.

“I think I will take a trip outside the city.” Ignis can see the way the gears have begun to turn behind Noct’s eyes and can’t help but feel a little nervous that his ulterior motive will somehow be discerned. “I’ve found myself feeling a little nostalgic in my old age. I want to travel Lucis again like we used to, for a little while.”

“Old age?” Noct echoes. “You’re thirty five!”

Ignis hides his smile behind his hand as he adjusts his glasses.

⊶⊷

Ignis doesn’t take a lot with him on his way out of Insomnia. Perhaps nostalgia made him a little foolish, but the idea of wandering Lucis with little more than the essentials was too tempting to pass up. It’s a return to the old days, in a way. It’s nice.

While Ignis presented his impromptu road trip to Noctis as a vacation of sorts, it was instead meant to be a way for him to survey the state of the country outside the Crown City. The remaining abandoned imperial bases have been a particular concern for Ignis since the restoration of Insomnia, so he plans on going through the lesser known ones himself in case there are any remnants of imperial weaponry left behind. Most of the bases within Lucis proper have been picked clean —if not torn down— following the Long Night, but there are some set in the wilds on the far side of the Rock of Ravatogh that haven’t been properly searched by hunters nor Glaives. There is a good chance that daemons may remain in dark places out there, not yet flushed out and decimated by sunlight.

Out of habit, Ignis avoids the main roads on his way out west. During the ill-fated road trip years ago, he tended to stick to the more out of the way paths to avoid Imperial interference in their travels and he never quite stopped that even though it ceased mattering during the Long Night.

Ignis stays in a caravan for old times’ sake after the sun sets and finds he can’t quite stifle a smile as he lays down on the familiarly worn-down cot tucked against the back wall.

⊶⊷

The drive out to Ravatogh only takes a few more hours of driving after Ignis awakens. He parks his scuffed pre-Night coupé in the lot outside the old Verinas Mart and rents a chocobo from the ramshackle rental stable manned by a bored-looking teen with sunburned cheeks.

“How long, sir?” The stablehand yawns behind their hand, the watch on their wrist indicating that it’s already a quarter to nine.

“I suspect about two weeks—though I may need longer,” Ignis tacks the last part on apologetically as he fishes his wallet from his pocket. “Is that fine?”

“Max rental is usually a week,” the kid shrugs, “but if you leave your card on file and give us something as collateral, then you can keep it longer.”

Ignis sighs. He should have remembered that rentals are usually quite limited in time frame, but it has been a while since he did this. He runs through his belongings, trying to think of something he could leave.

“Is this acceptable?” Ignis offers his driver’s license, which he presumably shouldn’t need again until he returns anyway.

“Uh, sure Mr… Scientia. I’ll put it in the lockbox. Will you be needing greens or anything for Melon, here?”

“Yes, please.”

Melon is altogether a lovely bird, with bright eyes and feathers dyed a soft pink. She kwehs softly as Ignis sets up the saddle and bridle, nuzzling his gloved hands with her beak. Ignis thanks the stars that he’ll have pleasant company on his trip.

⊶⊷

While Ignis thankfully does not have to climb the great mountain clawing its way from the sea, he isn’t too pleased by the difficulty that comes with rounding the thing. Navigating the rocky paths is plenty difficult even with Melon being the agreeable sort. She tends to balk at ledges that Ignis’s old chocobo, who Noctis enthusiastically and completely arbitrarily named Pastrami despite Ignis’s protests, would have jumped with ease. Ignis can’t bring himself to be upset with her, though, as she is faster than Ignis expected she would be when the terrain is a little less treacherous. The trip rounding the mountain takes about a week, punctuated by nights spent at long-empty havens and on one memorable night a cave set into a cliff formed by a cooled lava flow. Ignis sketched out the odd designs the frozen flow made in the rock face while waiting for his supper to finish its roast over the campfire, promising himself to try painting it once he is back in Insomnia. It was certainly a departure from the jagged city skylines and desolate illustrations of still decrepit parts of Insomnia that Ignis is used to painting. 

At the end of it all, Ignis is glad to see the rumored Imperial base tucked behind the mountain’s west face and backed right up to the shoreline, right where he was certain it would be. It isn’t a massive base, but was supposedly somewhat self-contained given the small fishing operation that was located inside. In the early days of the Empire’s occupation of Lucian land, it was reported that the Empire often made civilian contractors of many of Galdin Quay’s commercial fishermen for the sake of teaching the Empire how to utilize Lucian shores to reduce the need for rations from the Imperial continent. The Crown City eventually put an end to that with thinly veiled bribery in the form of grants and tax cuts on fishermen who relocated their business to the Vesperpool and other areas that had little to no Imperial influence at the time. The damage was already done though, and the Empire made quick work of reducing the fish populations around Ravatogh to a mere fraction of their original numbers. Once the Empire made the switch from human soldiers to MTs however, their fishing operations came to a halt. Seeing as MTs had no need for sustenance of any kind, there was no longer a purpose for such a thing.

The facility still seemed to have its warehouse for storing its ill-gotten oceanic haul however, and as Ignis approaches the stronghold to get a closer look he can see the air shimmer slightly with a faint red glow.

“A magitek generator?” Ignis ponders aloud, running his fingers through the downy feathers on Melon’s shoulders. “Is there anyone left in there to keep it running, do you think? Surely not. It must have simply been left on through the Night.”

Melon kwehs out a few notes of sage wisdom in response. Ignis cannot make heads nor tails of what she meant to communicate, but appreciates the sentiment nonetheless.

“Let’s go inside, shall we?”

⊶⊷

Melon refused to cross the visible field marking the start of the magitek generator’s influence, much less enter the facility itself. With a heart heavier than it should have rightly been, Ignis sent her back to the post and resolved to hike back to the stable when he is done here. He truly did become somewhat attached to the bird in their brief travels together. He never used to be so sentimental but, well. They say that age changes a man.

The main entrance to the facility is a single large hydraulic door facing outward toward the fenced-in courtyard. A keycard reader is set into the wall on the right side of the door, which Ignis bypasses with a scanned image of an old general’s ID displayed on his phone. The reader beeps pleasantly and the old hydraulics groan as the door lifts slowly, dust falling from the edge of the metal slab as it rises.

Ignis draws his daggers from the sheaths at his belt, wishing that he had the luxury of Noct’s divine hammerspace at his disposal. Knowing that he could keep his hands free and yet still have his weapons the instant he needed them had always been a comfort. Now, he must settle for one or the other.

This facility is of a different type than those that Ignis, Noctis, and Gladio frequented in their travels through Lucis. While those had mostly been open-air affairs used for rapid troop deployment and mech storage, this is clearly meant to be a place that would be lived in —despite being more inhospitable than Shiva’s frozen heart. The boxy architecture and dim lighting do nothing to lend a friendly ambiance to the place. The corners of everything shimmer with the effects of the magitek generator contained somewhere beyond and Ignis has to stop himself from turning to face an imaginary enemy whenever the red glow flickers or shifts. 

It seems that this place is entirely dormant apart from the generator, but Ignis still treks deeper, wanting to ensure that the base is empty before he takes the time to search for intel and leftover tech from the pre-Night days. It isn’t until he reaches the closed-circuit monitor room that the unmistakable feeling of being watched descends upon Ignis like cold water down his spine.

Something moves behind him, and Ignis throws a dagger on impulse, forgetting that he can’t simply dispel and recall it at will anymore. It clangs against a wall and clatters to the floor as Ignis turns to face his adversary.

“Something tells me you shouldn’t be here, pretty boy,” the daemon —an arachne type— steps into the room and leans casually against the doorframe. “What’s a guy like you doing in a place like this?”

⊶⊷

The arachne is quite unlike anything Ignis has ever seen. While its lower half is the usual tangle of legs and frills that Ignis has come across many a time before, the upper half hardly appears daemonic at all. The grey-blue exoskeleton ends neatly at what would be the waist on a human, and the upper half maintains the appearance of a completely normal woman somewhere in her forties. It wears a white jacket to cover its torso, and its silvery hair is tied in a neat side-ponytail.

Ignis brandishes his dagger, and the daemon laughs.

“I doubt you’d be able to do much to me with that,” the daemon says. “But you can certainly try if you’d like.”  
“What are you?” Ignis deliberates on whether or not to approach the thing, trying to puzzle out just how complex this daemon’s faux sentience is. He was not unaware of daemons who retained the ability to communicate in their native tongue after their transformation from man or beast into monster, but the consciousness behind the voice never truly remained.

“That’s something of a long story,” the daemon grins, tilting its head back and inspecting Ignis through narrow eyes. “I don’t believe you answered my question, though. You first.”

“I don’t entertain the whim of monsters,” Ignis takes a step forward, hoping to draw the odd spectacle into lashing out. It was always easier to bait talking daemons into attacking first. It made for less guilt that way, for most. 

“That’s hardly a way to talk to a lady,” the arachne moves, legs skittering on the metal floor. It draws up to Ignis, towering over him easily despite being somewhat smaller than the similar daemons Ignis fought in the past. “I’m not one of those poor mindless bastards that used to roam the place before the sun came back.”

“I’m… sorry?” Ignis lowers his weapon, the growing doubt of his original interpretation of the situation becoming too much to ignore. “Are you… do you have a name?”

“Aranea, sadly enough,” the arachne rolls its —her?— eyes. “Sort of funny I suppose, but not for me. The name’s Aranea Highwind, former Commodore of Niflheim's Third Army Corps 87th Airborne Unit. Later a merc, and later on a spindly little rat in a cage. I don’t suppose you have a name, pretty boy?”

Ignis gives his name, completely lost as to how this is his real life.

“Ignis, huh?” Aranea tests the name with an indecipherable grin, flashing teeth a little too pointed to be normal when she speaks. “Wouldn’t happen to be Ignis Scientia, would you?”

“What of it?” Ignis itches to bring his single dagger up again, pitiful though it may be against a daemon of Aranea’s size. 

“Lotta important people had a hit on that prince of yours back in the day,” Aranea leans down, meeting Ignis’s gaze directly. “Lucky for you, the price was never quite right for me to track him down before everything went to hell.”

Ignis starts as something crashes down the hall outside the monitor room. A voice echoes from the same place a few moments later.

“Aranea! Are you talking to the rats again?”  
“Ah, the master of the castle,” Aranea scoffs. “Sweet fucking Shiva, good luck with _ that _ . I’ll leave you to whatever the hell you were doing.”  
And then she’s gone, scuttling out the door on the opposite end of the room without so much as a farewell. Ignis blinks, and turns to the previous entrance where metallic footsteps are fast approaching. Instead of another strangely sentient daemon darkening the doorway like Ignis expects, a diminutive MT stops dead there and stares from behind its emotionless mask.

“Hello,” Ignis says, because this day can’t get any weirder.

⊶⊷

The MT doesn’t move for a few moments. The dim lights illuminating the monitor room glint off the slightly tarnished metal armor, casting long shadows from stiff joints and ornamental protrusions. 

Suddenly, the MT rushes forward. Ignis drops into a battle stance on instinct, leveling his single weapon and preparing to spring in turn. He doesn’t quite get a chance, as the MT is considerably quicker than any other that Ignis has ever had the displeasure of fighting. The MT barrels into Ignis, knocking him to the floor and pinning him there with seemingly little effort. Ignis attempts to break its grasp, but doesn’t manage it with how absurdly powerful the MT seems to be.

It speaks, and Ignis almost isn’t surprised anymore.

“Why are you here?” Its voice is loud and incredibly humanlike, complete with false breathing and realistic tone shifts. It is easily the best vocal synthesis Ignis has ever heard, though he doesn’t think too much about that as he struggles to remove the daemonic bot from his person. “Who else is with you?”

Ignis coughs as the MT applies pressure to his ribcage with its knee, and he can’t quite tell if it’s on purpose or not. Either way, it does the job.

“I’m alone,” Ignis gasps out. Years of binding too much and for too long as an adolescent made his ribs abysmally weak compared to the rest of him, and no matter how much he trained he never fully recovered from his follies as a young man. The merest threat to press his ribs in is nothing for him to brush off lightly, and he has never regretted his prior disregard for his health more than now. “There is no one else with me.”

“Gods,” the MT scrambles off Ignis, snatching up Ignis’s final dagger from where it fell to the ground mid-tackle. It curls a spike tipped gauntlet around the handle and levels it inexpertly at Ignis. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“Trespassing, I’m sure,” Ignis offers. “I’ve done fair little else here.”

A choked noise rather like a laugh emanates from behind the MT’s mask. It lowers the dagger and does a slow turn, its free hand pressed to its face. “Astrals, what am I gonna do?”

Ignis tests the MT’s awareness of him, carefully rolling onto his stomach and levering himself up to a sitting position. The MT continues to talk to itself, growing increasingly fevered and loud the more it rambles. Ignis edges backward —still on the floor— but freezes when the MT seems to register that Ignis is still present.

“You can’t leave,” the MT says. “I’m sorry.”

Ignis hears something crash to the ground in the distance, and knows that he has gotten himself into something much worse than he anticipated.

⊶⊷

Ignis may be without his weapons, but he is hardly defenceless. He can’t match this strange MT’s robotic strength, but surely he can stall it long enough to give it the slip and escape this place and call in the Crownsguard to destroy —or perhaps capture for studying— the abnormal creatures here. The daemon appears nice enough, but there is no cure for the Scourge. The last remnants of daemons after the Dawn live weak in shadow, and can only be freed by death from the sun or the blade. To end her strangely long pseudo-transformation before she lost her will entirely would be a kindness. The jury is still out on the MT, which is beginning to seem to be some sort of artificial intelligence experiment perhaps. 

No matter what happens with these things Ignis has encountered, he will be getting out of here.

The MT doesn’t make a move as Ignis scrambles up, turns tail, and runs out the room the way he came.

As he moves, Ignis pulls his phone from his pocket with some difficulty and curses at the shattered, darkened screen. Cursory presses of the power button yield no response from the phone, which must have been broken when Ignis was sent sprawling by the magitek soldier. 

Without the scanned image of the clearance card Ignis had to bypass locked doors, he just has to hope that the door by which he entered the facility somehow didn’t lock behind him. 

No luck. Ignis rounds up on the firmly sealed door and tries to revive his phone one last time, bemoaning his lack of foresight in not carrying printed copies of the cards he would need to navigate the facilities he would be investigating. He can’t even try to brute force his way out, seeing as all entry points to Imperial facilities are highly reinforced. It would take the might of an Astral to break through a door, wall, or window in this place. Unfortunately, the world is all out of Astrals.

“Facility’s sealed, pretty boy,” the daemon says, creeping out from a side passage, tapping the blank key reader with a clawed leg. “Looks like you’re out of luck.”

⊶⊷

The next day is occupied by various fruitless escape attempts on Ignis’s part. The MT is nowhere to be seen, but every once in a while Aranea flits in and out to cheerfully mock him or occasionally offer locations of nearby dormitories when she feels that Ignis is looking tired.

“Trust me,” Aranea says, slipping into the breakroom sideways in order to accommodate her many legs and bulky lower half. “There is no way out of a base on lockdown like this. You’d be better served finding a room you like and making it yours.”

“Like hell,” Ignis mutters. He has, against his better judgement, found himself talking more and more to Aranea the longer this goes on. As it is now, Ignis is standing with his back resting against an Ebony vending machine, sipping dubiously old canned coffee he had to jimmy the lock on the machine to retrieve and resisting the urge to offer a can to this… daemon. Like she’s a coworker he’s having a meeting with over brunch. Like this situation isn’t odd in the slightest. “I have no intention of spending my days in an Imperial pit because a malfunctioning machine deemed it necessary.”

“A machine, huh?” Aranea muses. “You sure about that?”

“Well, MTs weren’t always machines I suppose,” Ignis feels a little affronted that Aranea would think he doesn’t know the origins of the magitek troopers. It became common knowledge after the Night fell upon Eos as survivors scavenged in old unsecured bases and came back with worrying documentation of projects involving daemonification and cloning. “But once the process is complete, they are machines nonetheless. The ego isn’t preserved in the same way that can occur in… daemons such as yourself.”

“If you say so,” Aranea offers nothing more.

⊶⊷

Ignis ends up picking a dorm room and making it his after another day passes with no progress in an escape. He still hasn’t seen the MT since it remotely locked the facility, but Ignis wakes up to find papers shoved under the door every morning. On the first morning it was a map of several floors of the facility, with locked and otherwise inaccessible rooms crossed off in red pen. The second morning had a brief note written in ludicrously shaky lettering informing Ignis that he is welcome to the greenhouse, hydroponics station, fishery, and the ill-kept kitchens tucked behind the cafeteria. The greenhouse is surprisingly well-tended for having been entirely self-contained for more than a decade. Aranea doesn’t seem the type to garden, but Ignis supposes she must have worked to maintain it during her time here. It isn’t as if the MT was doing it, surely.

It is rather nice to have free reign over a kitchen, Ignis supposes as he makes himself a quick dinner on the fourth day. The greenhouse supplies everything from vegetables to fruits and even fresh herbs, and while Ignis is beginning to grow a little tired of the farmed trevally he pulls from the fishery’s gillnets before each meal, he does rather enjoy this culinary opportunity fate has dropped into his lap. While cleaning the kitchen was quite a chore, Ignis rarely got such a large operation all to himself. The Citadel kitchens were always occupied by the chefs employed there, and while they could allow Ignis the use of almost anything given notice, they also had their own jobs to do and could not simply clear out for the whims of one man alone.

Noctis probably would have ordered it, if Ignis asked.

⊶⊷

A week into Ignis’s unintentional and unwilling stay at the Zahn Stronghold, there is a knock at the door of his dorm. He looks up from his current project, an attempt at fixing a radio transmitter he found in an unlocked office the night before, and tucks it underneath his cot before offering a welcome to who he is sure is Aranea beyond the door.

They are becoming something akin to friends, Ignis thinks. 

Who opens the door isn’t Aranea, however. It is the MT, with its blank faceplate and stiff posture, standing over-still in the doorway. It makes no move to enter once the door is open.

“Yes?” Ignis clears his throat. “Are you here to let me out of this godsforsaken place, or do you plan on staring at me until the door closes on its own?”

The MT’s head turns as it leans forward a little, seemingly taking stock of the room without actually entering it. Once that task is completed, its strange synthesized voice renders out a greeting.

“Hey,” it says, almost sounding sheepish. “I can’t let you go, but… well. I have reasons.”

“What reason could a thing such as yourself possibly have?” Ignis adjusts his glasses as they begin to slip down his nose. “Even a simple magitek AI has to acknowledge that there is no reason to keep a prisoner here. The war is over. Your country is gone.”

“Niflheim isn’t my country,” the MT responds. Before Ignis can reply to that confounding statement, the MT turns tail and departs.

⊶⊷

Ignis begins to see more of the MT after that, though it is never very talkative. Ignis gives up on talking to it after a few days of barely finding any answers from it as to the reason for his plight despite needling it as much as he could. Whatever it was programmed to be by an empire long gone, it is certainly taciturn and frustrating nowadays. 

“How about you ask about something _ other _ than when you’ll be let out or what’s going on outside?” Aranea suggests over tea one late night. “Besides, I could tell you what happens outside. We have a television, you know. We get the news.”

“I’m sorry?” Ignis nearly chokes on his small bite of pastry. His anxiety over Lucis’ —and Noct’s— wellbeing had slowly been increasing the more he was unable to access information about it. He draws his map of the facility, slowly becoming more crumpled with time, from the inner pocket of his jacket and spreads it on the table between himself and the opposite side, behind which Aranea has tucked her arachnid limbs underneath her and sat not unlike a cat on a window sill. “Where is it?”

“There’s rooms designed for the higher ups on the lower subfloors,” Aranea taps the section of the map depicting the floor in question. “A lot of the TVs are broken all to hell but there’s still one that works in— ah.”

The room is marked as locked on Ignis’s map.

“Can you get me access?” 

“Maybe,” Aranea hums. “My clearance here only goes so far, though. I don’t have full control over the facility.”

“And the MT _ does _?” Ignis scoffs at his sour luck. First the damn thing locks him away for vague reasons Ignis still can’t find the logic to, and turns out its cutting Ignis off from the one reliable source of information on the world outside. 

Aranea doesn’t reply properly. She simply pushes the map closer to Ignis and pillows her head on her hand. “Your king is fine, if it helps you buck up any. No reports on your being missing, however.”

Of course. Noctis expects Ignis to be away for months in the parts of Lucis with unreliable infrastructure. He won’t exactly be fazed by the lack of check in calls until the projected span of Ignis’s vacation is up.

Gods. Ignis resists the urge to bang his head on the table.

⊶⊷

Ignis becomes so used to the eerie reddish glow from the facility’s magitek generator that it’s jarring when the edges of the rooms are no longer swimming with projected energy. Ignis races through the facility after he realizes the generator has sputtered out, searching for malfunctioning doors to the outside. It seems that the place runs on a basic electric generator as well as the magitek generator however, as everything works as it should and continues to keep him sealed here.

Ignis gives up the search after fifteen minutes, and instead ends up wandering to the massive room on the lowest subfloor that houses the magitek generator if only to see why the energy generation has ceased.

Inside the generator room, the MT fumbles inside an open panel with its gauntleted hands. Its fingers, hardly suited for delicate tasks, seem to be giving the MT quite some trouble with its goal to reconnect several wires that are looking incredibly unkempt.

The MT is shaking.

Ignis wanders closer, peering at the trembling soldier as it struggles to complete its task. If Ignis didn’t know any better, he’d almost assume it was something in pain by the way it shudders and jerks the more time goes on. A noise almost like wheezing begins to emanate from behind the mask.

One of the wires sparks, and the MT jumps back as a jolt must be delivered into the MT’s right gauntlet.

“Fuck!” The MT curses, coughs, and tears its gauntlet off.

Beneath the gauntlet, pale and frail, is a human hand. Dotted with nearly-invisible freckles and dangerously bony, but all too real.

The MT… is not an AI. It’s not an MT at all. Not like the others.

Ignis has scarcely a moment to think about this before the MT begins to choke, its wheezing evolving into a coughing fit that it can’t seem to shake. It stumbles over to the generator, resuming its efforts to reconnect the frayed wires even as it convulses with the effort of trying to draw breath. Ignis rushes forward before he thinks too hard about it, nudging the MT out of the way and using his steady, gloved hands to reconnect the wires himself. The generator flickers back to life the moment the ends are attached properly, and within seconds the faintest red glow that Ignis has grown so familiar with returns to the world. The MT’s fit subsides after a few moments, and it drops to its knees on the floor as Ignis turns around.

“You’re human,” Ignis says. “Aren’t you?”

The MT shakes its head, its visible hand tightening around the gauntlet it’s clutching. “Don’t say that.”

“What do you mean? It’s true, isn’t it?” Ignis steps forward, and the MT scrambles back on its knees. “This whole time. You’re human under there.”

“Not anymore,” the MT continues to move away even though Ignis stays still. “I never really was, anyway.”

Once again Ignis finds himself alone as the MT hurries from the room without him.

Ignis replaces the panel on the generator.

⊶⊷

If Ignis eats one more galdin trevally he is going to lose his mind. There are only so many ways he can prepare one type of fish, and Ignis is growing sick of the repetition. Not to mention the lack of variety in his protein sources is making Ignis worry that he may begin to develop some sort of nutritional deficiency if this trend keeps up. Maybe anemia.

After all that time he spent lecturing Noctis on a balanced diet when they were younger! It figures that Ignis would be the one suffering this type of problem.

Aranea watches Ignis pick at his meal with an amused smile, occasionally taking sips from a mug of mint tea. After Ignis tries and fails to look like he’s actually enjoying the stir fry he’s made for his supper this evening, Aranea sets her mug down heavily. “You know you don’t have to eat fish every meal, right?”

“If I have other options, please enlighten me.” 

“Well,” Aranea begins counting on her fingers. “There’s anak, garula, shieldshears, daggerquill, gigantoad. Pretty sure there’s dualhorn too but I’m not sure. Never liked it so I never bothered checking.”

Ignis feels tempted to upend his bowl in the daemon’s face. “_ Where _?”

“Niflheim’s famous for its cloned meat, isn’t it?” Aranea shrugs. “The storeroom behind the kitchen has a small-batch cloning machine in the back loaded with protein sequences for a shit ton of stuff like that. I’m surprised you hadn’t noticed it by now.”

By the gods, Ignis _ has _ noticed it but he hadn’t a clue what it was and couldn’t find a manual for it so he left it well alone. 

Ignis pushes his chair back, takes his bowl to the sink, and throws his meal into the waste disposal. “Show me how to work it.”

“If you insist,” Aranea grins and _ scuttles _along behind Ignis as he tears a warpath toward the storeroom. 

Funny, Ignis almost forgot she was a spider daemon from the waist down.

⊶⊷

“Hello,” Ignis hesitates in the doorway. “Am I intruding on something?”

The MT freezes, then slowly resumes its organizing of printed photographs on the desk. “No. You aren’t. What do you need?”

The MT is still in its full armor, even though the jig is up and Ignis is aware that it is much more than a lifeless automaton. Why?

“I wanted to talk to you,” Ignis ventures closer to the desk the MT is standing at. Through sheer luck he had happened to be wandering by when the door to this usually locked room was standing open, and the MT was inside. Ignis has seen precious little of it since the generator incident, so he took the chance as it was given to him. “If I may?”

“Sure,” the MT steps a little to the side to allow Ignis room at the desk.

Ignis peers down at the photographs. They are all well shot and well-kept despite the mark of time yellowing their edges. Many are of the sky at various times of day, and quite a few are of various domestic cats stretching out on sidewalks and dogs with leashes stretching high out of frame. There is one picture that catches Ignis’s eye, and he picks it up and draws it closer to his eyes.

“Insomnia?” Ignis can hardly believe it. This image is one of pre-Fall Insomnia, captured at the exact angle that Ignis has depicted in a nearly-completed painting of his waiting for him back at home. 

“I liked to think I was good at photography back then,” the MT shifts on its feet. “I wasn’t really, but it’s nice to still have these. I can see the sun on the TV and all, but this makes me remember what it was like to actually feel it. For a little bit, anyway.”

“How long have you been here?” Ignis carefully places the picture of Insomnia’s skyline back where he had retrieved it from. He realizes he’s holding his breath as he awaits the MT’s reply. “You were in Insomnia, but left. You ended up here. For how long?”

“Thirteen years,” the MT keeps its head tilted down toward the photos. “Give or take, anyway.”

“The Fall.”

“Yeah,” the MT opens a drawer and draws out even more printed photos. It shuffles through them, nearly dropping a few, before pushing one into Ignis’s hands. The photo depicts a crowd of ash-covered, wounded, devastated people traversing around the photographer paying them no mind at all. Barely visible from where it extends into the sky behind the fleeing refugees is the remnants of Insomnia, casting smoke into the clouds. An imperial warship looms menacingly in the distance. “I was there. I thought— well. I was a stupid kid. I thought that taking pictures of what was happening to us would help somehow. Like a wartime photographer you get in Eos Geographic, right? But it didn’t do a damn thing. I carted my camera around, printed my pictures where I could, and eventually the Empire snagged me from a checkpoint for shit that wasn’t even my fault and it all went to waste.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did the Empire abduct you?” Ignis presses. “If it wasn’t for the war photography?”

The MT laughs. “I was always theirs anyway. I just didn’t know it.”

Ignis slides the photograph back into its drawer and pushes it closed. “Is that so?”

The MT begins to stack all the photos up into categories, seemingly by the months notated in the timestamps on the back. It doesn’t reply, and once its photos are sorted and put away it makes to leave once more.

“Wait,” Ignis blurts once the MT is almost out the door. It stops for him, but doesn’t turn around. “What is your name?”

“Prompto,” the MT says. “For what it's worth. My name is Prompto.”

⊶⊷

“You knew that Prompto is human,” Ignis pries open the back of the broken radio with his flathead screwdriver and peers at its insides, trying to determine if he can take anything out of it to repair his radio transmitter. It doesn’t look immediately promising, but Ignis works at levering out a concealing panel just in case. “You didn’t say anything.”

“I’ve done my time when it comes to dealing with his crises,” Aranea tinkers with another broken radio, retrieved from the same defunct storeroom Ignis has been scavenging most of his busywork projects from. She’s been gutting ruined electronics and sliding the parts across the table to Ignis since he sat himself down several hours earlier. “His level of humanity is a debate I have absolutely no interest in taking part in these days. It’s been about a decade of that shit, and considering the fact that I’m more spider than woman he gets on the edge of insulting half the time he gets riled up about it anyway. Better to just let you deal with that on your own. You’re sharp enough to figure these things out without help from little old me.”

“Still,” Ignis grimaces. “You let me treat him like a machine the whole time I’ve been here. Like some… lifeless automaton.”

“I don’t _ let _you do anything,” Aranea tosses a bit of wire toward Ignis. “You’re your own man, aren’t you?”

⊶⊷

This isn’t working.

Ignis has never been mechanically-minded. Though he is skilled in many aspects, machinery and electronics were never something that he tinkered with or sought to learn the workings of. Ignis has always felt satisfied with his studies and his artistic hobbies, and never felt the need to expand into figuring out how exactly a radio works or how one would rewire an electronic lock.

He regrets it quite a bit now.

The broken radio transceiver Ignis has been trying to repair for weeks now is in pieces once again, spread out on the pristine white fitted sheet spread tight over the spare cot in Ignis’s room. Try as he might, Ignis can’t figure out what is wrong with the radio. He has to have replaced nearly every part by now as best he could with other parts he is almost certain are equivalent. The damn thing is a real ship of Theseus at this point, and yet it still refuses to turn on, much less transmit anything to the outside world.

This isn’t working, and Ignis is certain he’s going to lose it.

Ignis has learned over time where Prompto’s usual haunts are. A fair bit of them are in rooms that remain locked, but Ignis has noticed Prompto lingering in the massive room that comprises the hydroponics wing lately. Ignis decides to make his way there, and if Prompto is absent then Ignis is gonna pound incessantly on every locked door he comes across until he finds who he’s looking for. 

“I’m not going to wait for answers anymore,” Ignis mutters to himself as he hurries through the halls, just slow enough to avoid running. “I have a life outside. I have friends. I have my king. I can’t sit here any longer.”

Prompto is in the hydroponics wing, which is rather fortunate as Ignis was hoping to avoid going from locked door to locked door like some sort of frenzied trick-or-treater with anger management issues. Ignis rounds the set of gullies blocking his path and reaches out to grab Prompto’s armored shoulder.

The moment Ignis’s fingers brush metal, Prompto leaps away. His armor rattles with the force his feet hit the ground with, and the sudden movement triggers a coughing fit. Prompto catches his breath after a moment, one gauntlet pressed over the eternal smile carved into the MT mask Prompto bears. “What— what is it?”

Ignis swallows down the unease that fell bitter on his tongue the longer Prompto struggled to breathe, focusing instead on the comparatively easier to bear frustration that still simmers in his chest. “Why can’t I leave?”

The magitek generator’s red glow stutters for just a moment in the edges of Ignis’s vision.

“You just can’t,” Prompto says. “Now can you leave me alone?”

“Come now,” Ignis crosses his arms. “What are you, thirty? Thirty five? Certainly old enough to stop acting like a child. There’s no reason to keep me here, and I grow tired of trying to manufacture my own escape. Tell me why you’ve sealed the facility.”

“I’m thirty three,” Prompto responds. 

“Thirty three, then.”

Prompto’s shoulders hike up a little, the movement dreadfully obvious when amplified by bulky plating. He casts a glance around, then levels his gaze somewhere at Ignis’s feet. “You’re someone important on the outside. I’ve seen you on the tv, you know. Before you came here. You were the King’s advisor. His chief military strategist.”

“I still am.”

“Exactly,” Prompto’s voice wavers. “If I let you go, you’ll tell them. You’ll tell them about us. That we’re still here. That Aranea’s alive. And seeing her, the way she is… they wouldn’t even wait a moment before they kill her. Do you get it?”

It occurs suddenly to Ignis that he really _ didn’t _ think a lot about what he would do once he was back in Insomnia. He would _ have _to inform the Crown of the operational Imperial facility in the outskirts of the kingdom. Right?

“Listen,” and Prompto reaches out. Grabs onto Ignis’s wrist with a hand plated in cold metal. “Sooner or later my time will run out. I don’t give a shit what happens to me. But Aranea? She’s the one friend I’ve had for the last thirteen years. Maybe the only one I’ve ever really had. If I can protect her, I will. No matter what.”

“I won’t tell anyone,” Ignis says. He isn’t sure if he means it or not and that makes his skin crawl.

“I don’t trust that,” Prompto says.

He’s probably right not to.

⊶⊷

Every morning, Ignis tries to turn on his phone. It never works, but it becomes a part of his standard morning routine. Wake up, attempt to contact the outside world, brush his teeth, cook breakfast. Every Saturday morning Ignis administers his testosterone shot after he awakens and counts his remaining doses. 

Today, the routine is broken. Ignis wakes up to a headache the size of Titan. He shuffles out of bed with much difficulty, forgets about his phone, and drags himself into the bathroom connected to his dorm. The man in the mirror looks as if he hasn’t slept in a week, and Ignis certainly feels like it.

Ignis brushes his teeth and considers the pros and cons of actually going about his day as opposed to going back to sleep. His exhaustion wins out and he lays back down not five minutes after he woke up.

⊶⊷

Ignis is startled awake by something shaking his shoulder. He blinks blearily up at the silhouetted figure standing above him, trying to clear the haze from his eyes and the pain from his skull. The lights only serve to intensify what must be a migraine, and Ignis wants nothing more than to be left alone to try to sleep it away.

“Hey.”

“Please be quiet,” Ignis plants his palms over his eyes, blocking out the harsh fluorescents Prompto must have turned on when he came in. 

“I— oh. Headache?”

“Migraine,” Ignis grates out. “What are you doing in my room?”

“You’ve been in here all day. I thought… I wanted to see if you were okay. It’s eight at night and you never… I’m sorry. I’ll leave you be.”

The lights are turned out. The door opens and then closes.

Ignis tries to go back to sleep and finds that he can’t.

⊶⊷

The magitek generator goes out once again the next day. Ignis is sitting with Aranea at the time, playing a game of Kings in the Corner in one of the keep’s old employee lounges. As soon as that telltale red glow vanishes from the room, Aranea throws her hand down and stands, rushing out to the hallway.

“What’s wrong?” Ignis follows behind her, having to jog to keep up with Aranea as she sets a quick pace with her long legs. “What does that thing even power? There’s nothing here that isn’t hooked up to the normal generators.”

“Magitek generators are specifically for powering magitek within facilities,” Aranea tosses the words back over her shoulder. “Prompto’s got some issues, and all the life support in his armor is powered by this piece of shit generator. S’why he can’t leave. If he goes out of the range of the generator, he’s done for in minutes. Same if the fucking thing finally gives out for good. I’ve gotta see if it can be fixed before the idiot bites it.”

Ignis finds himself increasing his pace, nearly overtaking Aranea as the door to the generator room comes into view. Halfway through the open door, slumped on the ground in a heap, is Prompto.

“Shit,” Aranea digs through the pockets of her jacket, pulling out a clear cylinder about the length of a pencil with the diameter of a quarter. A glowing red mass is suspended in the center of it. “Take this. See to the kid while I try to fix this fucking generator. If the red bit on the left side of his chestplate goes out, pull it out and replace it with this. It’ll keep his ventilator going for a little while, but it won’t last forever. I don’t have another if this one goes out too.”

Ignis may have his hang-ups about Prompto, but he can’t in good conscience leave the man to die like a dog on the floor. Ignis takes the power cell —perhaps a magitek core, though he can’t be sure— and settles on the floor next to Prompto. The armored man wheezes quietly behind his mask, and waves weakly in Ignis’s direction.

“Sup,” Prompto offers before breaking into yet another fit. The core embedded in his chestplate continues to shine. “F— funny seeing you here. Again.”

“Save your strength,” Ignis advises, as if he has any idea how to actually help Prompto at all.

“Sure,” Prompto drops his head back down to the floor and laces his fingers over his stomach. “Only a matter of time, though. Before we can’t fix that generator anymore.”

“Don’t say that,” Ignis sets the power cell down in his lap and places a hand over Prompto’s. “We’ll fix it.”

Aranea curses over by the generator, kicking defunct machinery away from her as she searches for something. Ignis watches, torn over staying with Prompto or helping Aranea find what she’s looking for. She seems to finally find it though, because she rounds on the generator with a vengeance once she pulls some sort of tool from a battered cardboard box tucked behind several others in the left corner of the room.

The core in Prompto’s chest begins to stutter just before the generator roars to life. Prompto croaks out a laugh when it does, brushing Ignis’s hands away and levering himself up on his elbows. “Well fuck. That’s always fun.”

Prompto sits up slowly and gathers his limbs beneath him. He doesn’t quite make it to standing, and Ignis barely manages to jump up and catch Prompto before he crashes back down to the floor.

“Careful!”

“Don’t push it, kid,” Aranea chides. She picks her way across the room, stepping over the bits and pieces of various machines that she tore through when trying to find what she needed to patch up the generator. “You’re always a mess after having to run off backup power. Let’s get some food in you and get you to bed.”

“I’m not a kid. I don’t need a snack and a nap like some kindergartner,” Prompto gripes, but he lets himself be lead down the hall, leaning heavily against Aranea’s daemonic lower half.

As they go, Ignis swears he hears Prompto whisper something to Aranea before they get too far out of earshot. Ignis doesn’t stop thinking about it for the rest of the night, mulling over the words until his dinner that night tastes like ash in his mouth and the mere thought of returning to his card game feels horribly selfish.

_ Why do you even bother anymore? _

Ignis stares down at his shattered phone screen that night and wonders.

⊶⊷

“You have to come with me,” Prompto bursts into the lounge one day. Ignis is entertaining himself with solitaire as Aranea is nowhere to be found today, and was honestly about seconds from falling asleep with his face in his cards. “Right now.”

“I’m sorry?” Ignis sets his hand down, not quite caught up to the urgency Prompto is exuding yet. “What is it?”

“Just come _ on _,” Prompto extends a hand, and Ignis takes it.

Prompto leads him to the section of rooms on the upper level that are all marked as inaccessible on Ignis’s map of the facility. Instead of pulling out a keycard, Prompto slides a panel on his right gauntlet out of the way and holds the opened section of the armor up to the keycard reader beside the first door in this hallway. When the card reader beeps and Prompto pulls his arm away, Ignis catches a glimpse of ghostly pale skin and a dark smudge of some sort of tattoo before Prompto slides the covering plate back over the tattoo.

Ignis can’t help but wonder what kind of tattoo would let Prompto enter an Imperial facility. The keycard readers only read barcodes, but surely keeping a keycard with a code on it is much easier than tattooing a code on yourself…

Unless, perhaps, the tattoo was another of the Empire’s experiments on a young Lucian refugee with no one to save him?

Or…

_ I was always theirs anyway. I just didn’t know it _.

Ignis tries to fight back his nausea as he steps into the newly-opened room.

It’s some sort of bedroom. More inviting than the barren dorms kept on other levels, the room has a comfortable-looking queen sized bed tucked in the far corner, a bookshelf stuffed with ragged novels against a wall, and a television mounted to the wall in front of the same model of couch that Ignis has seen in a few break rooms scattered through the facility.

The TV is set to the news station that Lestallum has recently begun broadcasting. Ignis is a little surprised at the fact that it reaches this distance, but he quickly stops thinking about it when he reads the breaking news banner set in red and yellow at the bottom of the screen.

**KING IN CRITICAL CONDITION FOLLOWING ASSASINATION ATTEMPT**

“Noct—” Ignis’s heart rattles to a stop. He turns to Prompto and looks into the glowing eyes of the ominous face plate obscuring the man’s true face. “You can’t keep me in here any longer. I have to get back to Insomnia. Damn all the rest, I’ll do whatever it takes to make you let me go.”

“You don’t have to—,” Prompto cuts himself off, turning his head away from Ignis’s scrutiny. “You really love him, don’t you?”

“Noctis?” A pause. Noctis is like a brother to Ignis, and is someone he can hardly live without. Noct’s unknown status gnaws at Ignis like a voretooth tearing the marrow out of a chickatrice bone. “Of course I do.”

“I get it,” Prompto steps away. “I do. Just— get your things together. I’ll set you up with an ATV from the hanger that should hopefully last you to the nearest chocobo rental.”

“You’re… letting me go?”

“Yeah,” Prompto rifles through the drawers of the little table beside the bed and returns with a keycard. “Here. Full access to the facility. Get your things, go out that front door you came in from like a month and a half ago. The hanger’s on the left and the ATVs are lined up close to the door. If you can drive a truck you can drive one of those pretty easy, okay? You’ll just need the keycard to start it.”

“Thank you,” Ignis turns the card over in his hands. Printed within the barcode is two strings of code: 05953234 and N-iP01357.

“Just go,” Prompto pushes Ignis toward the door. “My fault you’re here anyway. Just… I don’t care what you do, just make sure that nothing you say once you’re gone will get Aranea hurt. I don’t give a shit what else happens to this facility. Just promise me that.”

And Ignis does.

⊶⊷

“Long time no see,” the stablehand of the chocobo rental hands Ignis back his drivers license. “When Melon showed up without you, got to thinking that maybe you’d bit the dust out there.”

“I got busy,” Ignis hides a yawn behind his hand. He’d spent the last week sleeping as little as possible and fretting over the ATV’s power gauge as he made his way around Ravatough as quick as he could. Now that he’s nearly back home, the sleep deprivation is beginning to catch up to him. “You heard anything about the king?”  
“That poor dude,” the kid shrugs. “You’d think people would leave him alone after all he did at the end of the Night and all, but nah. People are assholes. Last I heard he’s still in the hospital or something, so. There’s that.”

“Right,” Ignis does his best to tamp down the anxiety vibrating through his bones. “Listen, is there anywhere around here I can purchase a phone? I broke mine while I was away.”

The kid points across the street to the Verinas Mart. “They’ve got crappy prepaids in there, I think. You know, the generic burner phone type. Flip phones and all that. Nothing great.”

“It’ll do,” Ignis hands the kid a tip that is probably more than the amount he spent on the rental. He’s in too much of a hurry to care too much. “Thank you.”

“Hey, no problem man. Take care of yourself. Things are getting a little weird lately, yanno?”

⊶⊷

“Gladiolus,” Ignis presses the phone between his cheek and his shoulder as he starts his car. “This is Ignis. Call me. I’m on my way back to Insomnia.”

Not two minutes goes by after the voicemail is finished before Ignis’s new phone begins to ring from the passenger seat. Ignis reaches over and blindly flips the phone open.

“Where the hell have you been?” Gladio provides no preamble. “There’s a difference between going on vacation and going off the fucking grid!”

“There were some unforeseen circumstances,” Ignis settles his phone back into the dip in his shoulder and returns both hands to the wheel. “My phone was broken beyond repair two weeks into the trip and I hadn’t the chance to get it replaced until now.”

“What the—”

“Enough about that,” Ignis clears his throat. “What happened? How is Noctis?”

“Got stabbed by a hunter during the monthly summit at Lestallum. I was still in the City since Ceras has got preeclampsia and Noct insisted I should stay home with her and that the ‘Guard would handle babysitting him just fine. Then he went and had a private meeting with Holly with no one protecting his dumb ass, and he got himself in the hospital with three stab wounds, a collapsed lung, and a lacerated kidney. He’s on the mend now, but he got pretty fucked up. He’s getting dreams again and shit. It ain’t pretty.”

For a year or so after Noct brought back the dawn, he had vivid nightmares of being impaled on the throne. Though it did not come to pass, the universe saw fit to bestow upon him visions of the future he had narrowly avoided much in the same way that Ignis saw this future in Altissia over a decade ago. Being stabbed in real life, even if only by a knife held by an ordinary man rather than a sword held by a spectral spirit, has to be dredging up those nightmares to a terrible degree.

“Where’s the hunter? What was his motive?” Ignis realizes he’s approaching a split in the road. One could take him to Insomnia, but the assasination attempt did happen in Lestallum. “And where is he now?”

“We’re in Insomnia. We got him brought back home once he was stable enough to move. More comfortable that way,” there’s noise in the background, and Ignis can hear some muffled movement before Gladio speaks to someone in the room with him. “Sorry, that was just Ceres. She needs a cup of water. Give me a minute.”

It’s odd how fast life went on even when Ignis was essentially cut off from it all during his stay at Zahn Stronghold. When he left, Gladio’s wife was healthy as could be and still quite mobile despite her rapidly growing baby bump. She must be nearing seven months by now, and is apparently suffering from a fairly dangerous condition.

Ignis wishes he could have been there to help.

But…

⊶⊷

Noctis is sleeping when Ignis lets himself into his room. Though no longer in the hospital proper, Noct is largely confined to his chambers while he recovers, and Ignis can’t help but smile a little at the familiar sight of Noct splayed across his bed in the middle of the afternoon.

Noct’s eyes blink open as Ignis approaches, and he sits up with a wince, pressing his hand to his chest. “It’s about time you showed up.”  
“My apologies,” Ignis sits on the edge of the bed at Noct’s feet. “I was indisposed.”

“I did say you needed a break,” Noct grins. “How was it?”  
“Fine,” Ignis shrugs. He hasn’t yet worked out what to say about his time away, if anything at all. “It was a change of pace.”

“Good. You’ve been going too fast for a long time now.” Noct holds an arm out and Ignis leans in, pulled into a quick but tight embrace. “It’s good to see you.”

“You as well,” Ignis draws back and draws out his backup smartphone, retrieved from his quarters on the way over. “Now, what needs doing while you’re laid up?”

⊶⊷

Ignis stands in front of his easel, examining the painting that’s lain on it for quite some time now. It is mostly completed, and though Ignis didn’t know it at the time when he started this piece, there is a photograph depicting the exact same place in Insomnia sitting in an Imperial keep across the country, taken at least thirteen years earlier.

It’s been a long day. Though there are plenty of assistant advisors and strategists who picked up Ignis’s slack while he was gone, not to mention Noctis himself taking quite the step up these last few years, there was a lot for Ignis to catch up on now that he’s returned to work. He’s exhausted, seeing as he’s been going nonstop since he got the news that—

Since he got the news.

Ignis wanders to his travel bag —carelessly tossed onto his bed upon his return— in a daze. He opens the front pocket and plunges his hand in, knowing what he will find.

The spare power cell Aranea had given him lies in his hand, radiating sickly red light.

_ I don’t have another if this one goes out too _.

Ignis hopes the generator doesn’t go out, but… he has no way of knowing if it does.

_ If he goes out of the range of the generator, he’s done for in minutes. _

⊶⊷

“Things never change, do they?” Gladio pulls at the collar of his Council uniform as the rest of the Council finally filters out of the room following the usual over-pompous obligatory farewells. “Coulda sworn it was seven fifty three all over again.”

“The Council tends to operate just the same regardless of who is sitting for it,” Ignis gathers his paperwork and tucks it into the appropriate pockets of his accordion organizer. “For a moment I almost mistook Miss Kalium for her great uncle. He served as a substitute for Sir Botero several times, if you remember that.”  
“Not really,” Gladio grimaces. “I didn’t pay much attention to who was who back then. The wrinkles and gold all fade together after a while —especially when you’re twenty and would rather be anywhere else.”

“If I recall, you ought to have been— ah. Miss Aurum,” Ignis narrowly avoids running into Cindy as he walks out the door into the Councilman’s Lobby. “My apologies.”

“No problem hun,” Cindy flashes a grin and steps away from the doorway to allow Ignis and Gladio room to pass. “My fault for hanging around in a sorry spot.”

“Regardless,” Ignis shuffles his thick organizer under his other arm and extends his hand. “I was hoping to see you after the meeting. I’m glad you made it out to Insomnia today. Your help has been invaluable in restoring the city and receiving outside input on our operations in Leide is always welcome despite how some of our Councilmen may act on occasion.”

Cindy laughs, waving away the offered handshake. “Don’t worry about it one bit. If I can handle jerks on the road all my life I can handle a few ornery hens in robes. You did right good in there today though, wrangling ‘em in. I’m not the type for these sorts of things y’know, but I could tell you certainly are.”

Gladio taps Ignis’s shoulder and announces that he has to get to training for the ‘Guard’s new recruits. Ignis steps aside to let him pass and move along.

“It’s what I was brought up for. I’m certainly glad to do it, if I must.”

The bell in the temple across beyond the gardens begins to chime. Cindy frowns and checks her watch: an intricate design of her own creation made during the Night. The face timepiece has a slight glow to it, powered by a miniscule magitek core scrounged from some imperial machine or another and modified to work without the Empire’s usual energy sources.

Ignis blinks.

“Cindy, would you mind if I ask you a personal favor?”

⊶⊷

Ignis has little to do but attend to his duties, paint, and wait. Guilt wells up in him every time he walks past the closet he has carefully hidden Prompto’s last backup power source in. Until the project he has commissioned from Cindy is completed however, he can’t justify traveling all the way back to the facility. He certainly wouldn’t be able to explain yet another extended leave to parts unknown.

So he waits.

Today, Ignis has turned away from the usual landscapes and city skylines he is so used to. He rarely draws people as a general rule, finding it hard to imbue the right look of life in their eyes with just canvas and acrylic, but… he had an odd creative urge that he couldn’t quite shake until he gave in and began to work.

A magitek soldier is depicted from the waist up at the bottom of the painting. One arm is missing while the other reaches toward the center of the canvas. The smiling mask is tilted up, lit from above and serenely empty.

The majority of the canvas is dominated by a stylized sun, emanating light to every corner of the piece. The MT’s gauntleted hand straining to feel the sun’s warmth is pierced through by a sharp ray of sunlight, bleeding black down the MT’s arm.

Ignis inspects his piece and promptly turns it away from himself, resisting covering it up only because he fears any covering cloth sticking to the paint and ruining it.

⊶⊷

“Video games again, Majesty?”

“Hey, don’t knock it,” Noct waves his controller in the air as if that demonstrates anything. “This one’s good. You’d like it.”

“Would I now?”

Ignis sets his box of pastries down on the counter, pockets his phone, and settles in on the couch next to Noctis.

“Yeah. It’s more story than gameplay, so the story is actually good. One of the characters reminds me a little of you now that I think about it. But, yeah. I used to play it way back when, I found this in my boxes from my old apartment.”

Ignis watches Noct navigate around the game’s current setting. The current player character weaves through some sort of nightclub before getting stopped by what appears to be an antagonist, triggering a cutscene that Noct seems to only be half paying attention to. “I may remember this one, actually. You spent quite some time trying to convince me to try it when you were just out of high school.”

Noct shrugs. “It’s a good game. Plus it wasn’t like I had any friends that liked video games back then. Or really… _ anyone _except for you, Gladio, and Luna. You and I didn’t share a lot of interests so I tried pretty hard to get you interested.”

“I did buy myself a console for my twentieth birthday,” Ignis can’t remember what ever happened to it. Probably ruined or lost when Insomnia was taken.

“You never played it though, did you?”

“I hadn’t the time,” Ignis says.

“Well, now you do,” Noct grins and offers Ignis the controller. “No excuses now. Wanna start up a new save?”

⊶⊷

Three weeks pass before Cindy gets back to Ignis, leaving him a voicemail about her completed project and letting him know that he’s free to drop by Hammerhead and pick it up anytime. A delivery to the Crown City, she informs him, would have a hefty fee.

“I try to avoid favoritism in business, so it is what it is no matter who you are,” Cindy pauses as there’s some commotion in the background. “Well, that’s my cue. Just swing on by whenever you have the chance, alright?”

Ignis leaves that night, packing up his things and citing a desire to check in on a newly-launched project at Hammerhead teaching children the allure of trades other than hunting. Noct let him go without too much conversation or fuss considering the fact that Ignis would be back the next day. The drive to Hammerhead is longer than Ignis remembers, and his hands are white-knuckled on the wheel the entire time.

⊶⊷

Noct is fully healed and back to his duties, though that hardly stops him from complaining about his nonexistent aching wounds whenever he wants to sleep in. As it is though, things are essentially back to normal.

Ignis still feels uneasy.

“Where’s Gladio?” Ignis scans the Councilroom as the rest of the Council fills their seats.

“He and some of the Crownsguard are going out west,” Noct hides a yawn behind his hand. “Someone reported an active imperial base out by Ravatough, so they’re gonna go check it out and shut it down. They left yesterday.”

Ignis’s mind goes blank. He stands up, hands shaking, and turns toward the door. “I— I have to go.”

Noct calls his name as Ignis runs from the room. Ignis doesn’t look back.

⊶⊷

There’s one chocobo left at the rental stable by the time Ignis gets there. It isn’t Melon, but it is decent enough. Ignis doesn’t really care at this point as long as he’s not walking.

A day into his trip around the mountain, it starts to rain. Ignis sweeps his hair from his eyes and pushes his chocobo onward. Taking a break early to get out of the rain will put him further behind.

Ignis doesn’t call Gladio. During the Night, Gladio tore through magitek and daemon alike with a ferocity matched by many who now fight for the Crown. Ignis asking politely for this base to be left alone with no decent explanation as to why would fall on deaf ears, and Ignis can hardly explain why he wants this place to be protected. Even if he did feel he could explain the connection he has with the base’s two inhabitants, he knows Gladio wouldn’t understand that despite holding Ignis against his will for quite some time, neither Prompto nor Aranea have sinister intentions. Prompto simply wanted to protect the life he was able to scrape out of hell for himself and his friend, and Ignis can’t fault him for his reasoning.

⊶⊷

One soldier stands outside the facility, tending to the rental chocobos. Ignis’s stomach churns at the sight, because that means the others must be _ inside _. 

“General Scientia,” the soldier, a recently recruited young woman by the name of Fides, looks up from her chocobo as Ignis rushes to dismount from his own. “We weren’t expecting you here. Is everything alright?”

“I have to get in to the facility,” Ignis yanks at his bag, fumbling with the straps to get it off the chocobo’s saddle. “It’s rather urgent.”

“What for?” Fides follows Ignis as he starts toward the entrance, trailing along behind him not unlike a puppy. “Are you okay?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ignis snaps, and he knows he’ll regret it later. “Return to your post.”

“R- right.” Fides salutes. “Yes, sir.”

Ignis scans the keycard Prompto gave him, and the door to the facility slides open.

⊶⊷

The first thing Ignis notices is that the magitek generator is out. Ignis’s heart crawls into his throat at the absence of its telltale glow throughout the halls, and he finds himself running through all Prompto and Aranea’s familiar haunts to no avail. Ignis only just enters the wing the generator is in when he hears a sharp burst of gunfire echoing from the direction he’s heading toward.

Ignis curses and quickens his pace, lungs burning in his chest. No one in the Guard uses guns, meaning either Prompto or perhaps Aranea are nearby and facing something —or someone— they have to fight.

Ignis frantically scans in his card and nearly cries at the scene he’s presented with.

Gladio and two of his highest-ranking subordinates —former Glaives who stayed on when the Crown’s military was consolidated into one organization— stand with weapons drawn just beyond the door. By the generator, Prompto is crumpled to the floor in his armor, one hand shakily aiming a handgun and the other clutching at his chest as he wheezes and coughs. Aranea looms over him with a dragoon’s lance in hand, her face is twisted up in fury.

Gladio is bleeding from the shoulder. A gunshot wound.

“You!” Aranea steps over Prompto, who protests weakly before breaking into another fit that has him fumbling his gun. Gladio’s subordinates raise their weapons and are swept aside by a single swipe of Aranea’s daemonic forelegs. “You brought them here!”

“I didn’t,” Ignis winces as Gladio whips around to face him, disbelief etched into his features. “They came of their own accord! I told them nothing of my time here.”

“Yet they’ve come!”

“Drop it,” Prompto begins to stand, the shaking of his body audible through the rattling of the metal plating his flesh. “It doesn’t matter. It just… it doesn’t. It’s done.”

“Prompto—”

“We had a good run.”

Gladio turns back and charges toward Prompto and Aranea, taking advantage of their momentary lapse of attention to push for an advantage in whatever the hell this has become. A hunt?

“Gladio, stop this!” Ignis casts a glance at the other Crownsguard, who are slowly recovering after being knocked into a supporting pillar and hopes they take a little longer to rejoin the fight. “They are not the enemy!”

It’s too late. Gladio’s greatsword is in mid-swing, retaliating for Aranea’s attack on his men. Aranea is able to deflect the flat of the blade, but the sheer force of Gladio’s strike knocks her off balance. She stumbles to the side, failing to gather her legs beneath her, giving Gladio an opening to Prompto. Ignis rushes forward but—

But.

Prompto raises his free arm to block the blow, as if anyone has the strength to stop an enraged Amicitia in motion. Gladio continues forward, one man set on wiping out the remnants of the twisted empire that took the sun from the sky and destroyed a home he is now struggling so desperately to rebuild. His sword hits metal and cleaves through.

Ignis notes, absently, that Prompto didn’t bother to raise his gun.

The metal shrieks as it is torn from the rest of Prompto’s armor, and he is jolted roughly to the side with the force of it. Prompto’s left forearm drops to the ground and Ignis is afraid to look for fear of being greeted with a terrible amount of blood and exposed bone that he knows lay beneath Prompto’s literal shell.

Ignis freezes. The arm is empty inside. The place where it disconnected from Prompto’s body has ragged wires and shorn piping in place of flesh and sinew. 

“Gladio,” Ignis steps between the Shield and his target before Gladio can raise his weapon once more, crossing his daggers loosely in front of his body in case he has to divert a blade. “Wait.”

“The hell are you doing?” 

“Leave them alone,” Ignis draws himself up to his full height, just a few inches shorter than his counterpart. The King’s other Hand. “They’re innocent.”  
“A daemon,” Gladio’s grip tightens on his sword as Aranea heaves herself up from the ground, baring her teeth in a grim smile. “A daemon and a malfunctioning MT. They ain’t capable of _ innocence _. They ain’t capable of anything but what they’re made for. These things aren’t people anymore, Ignis. What’s gotten into you?”

“I thought you grew out of this behavior long ago,” Ignis grits his teeth. “Impulsivity. Thinking you know what’s going on before you have the slightest idea. If you would wait for just one second—”

Gladio waves away his subordinates, who have crept up in loose formation behind him. “Get outside and keep watch. My orders haven’t changed.”

“Sir?” The man, Yura, casts a quizzical look toward Aranea before yielding. Ignis lets go of a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding as the soldiers depart.

A rattling cough startles Ignis into turning back to Prompto, who seems barely able to stand. The glow of the magitek core embedded in his chest piece is missing, and the mechanic stump of his left arm spits sparks. After a moment, he sinks to his knees with a heavy wheeze and drops his handgun on the floor.

“Prompto,” Ignis slings his bag off his back, crouching down to be face-to-face with him. “How long has the generator been out? And your backup?”

“Generator?” Prompto laughs. “That shit’s done for. It’s been a day and we can’t fix it and my backup just went out when you got here. Looks like this is it. Good timing, huh?”

“No,” Ignis rifles through his bag. “No, no. Just hold on.”

Prompto doesn’t make any promises. Just leans his head forward as if he’s praying. Maybe he is.

Ignis extracts the last backup power cell from his bag. “I have a backup here. You’ll be okay. Just… tell me how to put it in and we’ll get you fixed up.”

“One extra day?” Prompto’s breath rattles behind his mask. “Not really worth the effort if you ask me. You can take your friends and go. No harm no foul. This is pretty overdue, honestly.”  
“Stop it,” Ignis chides. He hopes the way his heart is pounding isn’t horribly obvious. “I won’t do that. Just show me how to fix this.”

Prompto taps the exposed end of his magitek core. “Press down and turn and it’ll come out. Like a medicine cap, right? Then just shove the other one in if… if you’re so determined to keep me going.”

Ignis has to struggle to keep his hands steady as he slides the spent power cell out of its slot. The socket for it is long enough that it _ must _ extend into Prompto’s chest cavity, though the inside walls of it are no more gory than the inside of an auxiliary port. Ignis suppresses the urge to shiver. He inserts the magitek core and it sputters to life. The glow is weak without the facility’s generator to sustain it further, but it works.

Prompto takes a clear deep breath, and releases it in a whine.

Ignis feels a hand drop on his shoulder. He looks up to Gladio and knows he has a lot of explaining to do.

⊶⊷

“You sure know how to flatter a girl,” Aranea grimaces at the fairly dismal airship hull, hefting her bag up on her shoulders. “Don’t assume you have an oversize load sign in the front?”

“You can’t really… fit in a car. With all due respect, uh. Ma’am,” Fides shuffles her feet. “Airship’s the best we got right now if we wanna move around the mountain out of the daylight with any speed. Can’t exactly call in a pickup truck.”

“If we may,” Ignis leads Prompto up to the airship’s gangplank, one arm supporting him under the shoulders. “Time is of the essence, I’d think.”

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” Aranea moves forward regardless, ducking her head under the door’s overhang and edging into the ship.

Prompto trips on the edge of the gangplank, only staying up because of Ignis holding him up.

“Are you alright?”

“Peachy,” Prompto sighs. “First time out in the sun for a decade and change and I can barely stand. Figures.”

“You’ll have many more soon,” Ignis promises. “Let’s just get you to the city.”

“Sure,” Prompto drops his still-helmeted head onto Ignis’s shoulder as they settle into one of the benches lining the hull’s walls. His breath is still coming a little hard, and Ignis takes the time they have now to extract the project he commissioned from Cindy out of his bag. Prompto hums at the sight of the simple, slightly-battered cardboard box in Ignis’s hand. “What’s that?”

Ignis unearths the small device and turns it, finding a simple switch on the back protected behind a clasped panel. Ignis flips it open and turns the switch. “I happen to be good friends with who just may be the best mechanic on Eos.”

“Wha—oh! How…” Prompto sits up and holds his remaining hand out for the device as it begins to emit a red glow. “How did you do this?”

Relief spreads through Ignis’s blood as he watches Prompto’s backup core steadily grow brighter. “My friend —a miss Cindy Aurum— became quite proficient in modifying magitek for her own purposes during the Night. I asked her to make this when I returned to the city.”

“A portable generator?” Prompto cradles the device delicately. “Why? After you left, I… well. I trapped you there. You had no reason to help me. Why would you do this?”

“You were afraid,” Ignis pushes the generator back toward Prompto when he tries to return it. “You were protecting your friend the only way you could. This is yours. It’s sturdy, and has hooks to strap it to a wrist or some such. Like a watch. I’ll have her work on a replacement just in case, but with her craftsmanship I doubt you’ll need one.”

“I don’t know what to say…”

The door to the bay closes slowly as the last of Gladio’s men file into the airship with their hesitant chocobos in tow. Gladio himself double checks the latches before turning to the motley crew lingering in the entry.

“Let’s get back home.”

“Home,” Prompto echoes. 

Ignis offers him a smile, mirrored by the static one carved into Prompto’s faceplate. Prompto ducks his head.

⊶⊷

As soon as they reach Insomnia, Prompto is bundled off to the Citadel’s medical wing with his generator in tow, and Aranea is given an out-of-the-way guest room with blackout curtains to stay in. No one is quite sure what to do with Aranea yet, but Prompto refused to leave without her and Ignis refused to leave without Prompto. Many favors were called in.

Now, Ignis sits in the medical wing’s lavish waiting room, sipping on a can of coffee and doing his best not to nod off. It’s been a long few days.

“So,” Noctis sits heavily in the chair next to Ignis’s. “That’s where you were all that time?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

Ignis swallows. “He trusted me not to.”

“So you lied to your king for him?” Noct’s face is, for once, indecipherable. A blank mask not unlike the one his father used to adopt at times.

Stricken, Ignis clenches his fists and avoids Noct’s eye. “By omission, Noct.”

A pause.

“Glad to hear it, honestly.”

“...I’m sorry?”

“Listen,” Noct angles himself toward Ignis, manually lifting and planting his bad leg with his hands. He isn’t wearing his brace again. “I was starting to think you’d never find anything outside of your job. Taking care of me, of the country, of everybody here—”

“—You’re certainly more than a job to me!”  
  
“I know,” Noct appeases. “I just meant that… I don’t know. You’re thirty-five, Ignis. You’ve got a lot of life left and I don’t want you spending it with nothing but people who either _ are _your job —in a way— or are people you work with. If traipsing off into the unknown and making pals with some sort of… MT guy. If that’s your thing? Then alright. Whatever works for you. As long as you’re happy, you know? You’ve done so much for me, Ignis.”

As Noct went on, his voice grew softer and softer still. At the last syllable of Ignis’s name, Noct meets his eyes. 

“You may be… misinterpreting the nature of Prompto and I’s relationship.”

“Sure,” Noct shrugs. “Whatever you say, Specs.”

⊶⊷

Prompto’s incarceration and subsequent isolation did little for his general health. Cruel experimentation took three of his limbs, a significant portion of bone and muscle from his upper torso, and a great deal of the functionality of his lungs, leaving him to rely on an artificial internal respiratory system and several MT-based prostheses in order to be any form of self-sufficient. He has multiple nutritional deficiencies, and is apparently rather fragile in general after having been encased in armor for many years. Despite it all, he has a good chance of recovering and being able to live a fairly normal life as long as he replaces his magitek prostheses and keeps his portable generator on him to continue powering his internal modifications. The mystified doctors tentatively credit his remarkable medical staying power to genetics and possibly a side effect of the experimentation he underwent back in 756.

Ignis lingers now outside the door to Prompto’s room, hesitant to intrude but still wanting to see how Prompto is faring with his own eyes.

“You just gonna stand there?” Prompto’s voice is soft, and a little rough. It sounds different, now that Prompto is likely unmasked.

Ignis steels himself. “May I come in?”

“Door’s unlocked,” Prompto replies.

Ignis waits a few seconds just in case Prompto rescinds the offer for some reason.

“Hey,” Prompto tilts his chin up as Ignis steps into the room. Prompto’s eyes —blue for the most part, the irises ringed with red on the edges and melting into violet inbetween... there’s something brittle in them. 

He looks sick, which is understandable considering the circumstances of his condition. His cheekbones are prominent beneath faintly freckled pale cheeks. His collarbones jut sharply where the collar of his hospital gown hangs loose. His hair is clean and dry but has the look of a pocketknife haircut done in the dark. There are conspicuous dips beneath his blanket where his legs would be if he still had them below his mid-thigh. Scars, faded by a decade but still noticeable, peek out from under the collar of his gown. 

Prompto smiles weakly as Ignis’s gaze sweeps over him. “That bad, huh?”

“No,” Ignis says, and means it. “No, not at all.”

“You can be honest. The Niffs really did a number on me.”

“A few weeks in the hospital and you’ll be feeling much better,” Ignis rests his hands on the footboard of Prompto’s bed. “Cindy and Doctor Claudius are looking into replacement prostheses, if you’d like them. We didn’t want to assume.”

“Well,” Prompto searches around and finds the hand control for his bed. He moves the back up a few ticks so he’s sitting straighter. “Anything’s better than the MT shit they slapped on me. I could do without the claw hands and the built in knives and the vague… scourge-y poison.”

It’s odd to see Prompto’s face after so long of it being locked away behind a mask. Ignis finds himself having trouble looking away. The novelty of having proof that Prompto really is a man, really is real and human and here, refuses to fade. “We’ll make sure that it gets taken care of.”

Prompto shifts and leans toward the bedside table, reaching for a styrofoam cup of ice water that has been left for him. Ignis hurries to his side and Prompto sends him a scathing look as he snatches up the cup and draws the straw to his lips.

“I can do it,” Prompto says after he’s done drinking. “Really. Rule of thumb? Don’t swoop in to help unless I ask for it. I appreciate it and all, but I can take a drink without you keeping the straw steady.”

“My apologies,” Ignis withdraws. “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s fine. Just remember next time.”

⊶⊷

“Can I ask you something?” Prompto slows his power wheelchair to a crawl, dropping back to move alongside Ignis. “Like. No pressure, I guess. I just wanted to know.”

“What is it?” Ignis shuffles his coffee to his other hand and pulls out his wallet as they come up to the doors to the gardens. He flashes his ID card to the guard to the gardens, though he doesn’t technically have to considering his status and the fact that he lives in the Citadel. Prompto holds his own ID up from the lanyard around his neck and they’re waved through the doors.

As they cross into the courtyard gardens, Prompto sighs, closes his eyes, and turns his face toward the sun. Ignis gives him his moment, as he always does when they come out here. Letting Prompto enjoy the sunlight he was denied because of the Scourge-imbued prostheses and the quite limited reach of Zahn Stronghold’s magitek generator is hardly an inconvenience.

“So,” Prompto begins again once Ignis settles down on a stone bench and Prompto locks the wheels on his chair. “I’ve been wondering. Why’d you come back for me and Aranea? When you knew the Crownsguard was coming for us. You could’ve just left it alone, especially after what I did to you, trapping you for so long,” Prompto chokes a little at this, his words coming quicker and quicker the more he speaks. “I made you— I made you a prisoner. Like the Empire did to me. I made you a prisoner and it was all for nothing anyway because they found us and it all ended up okay. I can’t really figure out what’s even in it for you after all this, I know you said it was fine because I was scared you’d get Aranea hurt but that’s really no justification—”

“Prompto,” Ignis rests a hand on Prompto’s elbow where it hangs off the armrest of Prompto’s chair. “I understand why you did what you did, and when it really mattered you opened the doors to me without a second thought. Besides, the facility was hardly a prison in the traditional sense for me. Don’t equate yourself with the... with the monsters that stole you and hurt you beyond all reasoning. You are nothing like the imperials.”

Prompto shakes his head. “I _ am _ imperial, you know. This tattoo— this one here. You know what it means? I was meant to be an MT. I was cloned for it, really. Somehow I ended up in Lucis as a baby before they could do to me what they eventually tried later, but still. I was never even a real human to begin with.”

“I’m aware of the magitek production program,” Ignis considers. “Most are, these days. The general consensus among the people is that it was human experimentation the Empire was doing. Every child created and lost to Besithia is mourned by Eos as just that… children. You are no exception.”

Prompto laughs. “Whatever you say.”

“I mean it,” Ignis pulls on Prompto’s arm a little, prompting him to look over. “You’re as human as they come. Your origins, your past —all of it, even what is more recent than not— it doesn’t have any standing on that truth.”

Prompto meets Ignis’s eyes for just a moment, but just as quickly turns away. “...you sure you’re okay with me? With what I did?”

The breeze rustles a few petals off a cluster of sylleblossoms just beyond Ignis’s bench. He watches them flutter into the air and nods.

⊶⊷

“Your Majesty,” Prompto doesn’t quite have the capability to bow seeing as he’s currently physically occupied by several people taking his measurements, but he dips his head as much as he is able. “I… uh. It’s… an honor.”

Noct waves his hand dismissively. “You don’t have to do that.”

“...right,” Prompto grimaces. “Sorry about… all this.”

Prompto’s pant legs are hiked up to his upper thighs to allow for proper measurement of his limbs, and he’s far from put-together as they’ve been at this for nearly an hour now.

“Don’t worry about it,” Noct settles himself into a chair by the bed, leaning his cane —a common accompaniment to Noct’s leg brace following this last assassination attempt— against the side of it. “Prompto, right?”

“Yeah. Prompto Argentum.”

Noct studies Prompto for a moment. “You’re from the Crown City, aren’t you?”

“Technically,” Prompto hesitates.

Ignis watches the various prosthetists finish up their work out of the corner of his eye as he skims through the news on his phone. He doesn’t pay specific attention to Noct and Prompto’s conversation, but he doesn’t _ not _ pay attention either.

“We, uh. We went to the same schools actually,” Prompto says. “Same middle and high school, at least.”

“We never talked, did we?”  
A laugh. “Nah. Well… maybe once, I guess? But not really. It was a long time ago.”

“You do look kinda familiar. Maybe you… uh. Did you have a camera you carried with you a lot?”

“I did. It’s probably— well. Probably not there anymore. Left that old thing in my apartment when the city fell. But like… you remember me? Because of my camera? Really?”

“Well, yeah. I always wondered why you never talked to me after that one time. I remember it.”

“We’ve met now, at least. For better or worse, yeah?”

“Mr. Argentum,” one of the prosthetists calls in the middle of the lull between conversation. “I believe we have everything we need for now. In a week or so we should have temporary sockets for you to test out before we make your final prosthetics.”

“That fast?” Prompto runs his hand over the end of his left arm. 

“The Crown has access to the best prosthesis manufacturers in the country,” Ignis replies, locking his phone and setting it in his lap. “Sometimes we call in Miss Aurum —the mechanic who made your portable generator— but the city itself has a decent amount of specialists as well. Guardsmen tend to want to continue active work here even after losing mobility, and the Crown is always happy to help get our people back on their feet, so to speak. We are nothing without our people, after all.”

“Right…” Prompto blinks, and turns back to Noct. “Are you… paying for all this?”

“Healthcare is free,” Noct shrugs. “You’re paying the same thing here you would be anywhere else. Taxes cover medical costs for everybody.”

“Oh. That’s new. It wasn’t like that before the Fall, was it?”

“New government, new country,” Noct’s eyes flicker over to Ignis. “I like to think we’re rebuilding things better than they were before.”

Ignis hides a smile behind his hand.

⊶⊷

The barn is new, well-built and littered with little luxuries making it well-suited for human habitation. It’s fitted with running water, electricity, and several rooms originally meant for sorting and storing supplies for a chocobo stable that ended up moving its business elsewhere last minute. Ignis can see the layout of a kitchen in his mind’s eye from the doorway of the largest room on the main floor. Because of the barn’s proximity to Hammerhead, Cindy Aurum ended up buying it when the stable plans fell through, which is why Ignis knows about it at all.

“There’s only a couple windows up on the upper loft,” Cindy points up to the darkened glass far above them. “But the way I figure it, those can be covered right up with blackout curtains and it should be just fine in here.”

“You sure you’re okay with keeping a literal daemon on your property?” Aranea descends from the loft, clutching at the stair rail with one hand as she does her best to navigate the narrow steps with her many legs. 

“S’long as you pay your rent on time and don’t go scaring my customers?” Cindy grins, big and bright and with a glint in her eye that Ignis isn’t sure he wants to interpret. “You can stay here as long as you want, hon. ‘Specially with that face of yours. Could always use an extra hand or eight in the shop if you’d like, at night. We don’t have the daemon lights anymore or nothing, so you won’t have to worry about none of that.”

“Takka and this region’s hunter coordinator have been apprised of your situation as well,” Ignis adds. “If you’d prefer night hunting over mechanic work or an online occupation you’re pre-approved to acquire dog tags. Just ask at the front counter of the diner.”

“What do you think?” Prompto, looking a lot better than he did right out the armor but still rather wan, moves over to a rest beside Aranea, gesturing out to the room at large. “Better than the facility, huh?”

“_Maybe_,” Aranea pauses as Prompto makes an exaggerated sad face, then grins and amends her statement. “Nah— it’s good, kid. I think I’ll like it out here. As long as you come to visit me, alright? Don’t forget about me when you’re living it up in that castle up there with your new legs and your pretty boy boyfriend over there.”  
  
“Excuse me?” Ignis can feel his face splotch with heat. 

Prompto scolds Aranea, playfully hitting the side of one of her forelegs with his hand. 

It is then that Ignis starts to consider—

⊶⊷

“Man,” Prompto stifles a yawn as he and Ignis traverse the hallways toward the guest room Prompto has been moved to as he waits for his prosthetics to be completed. “The hell am I supposed to do with myself after all this? Can’t really imagine going out and getting some normal civvie job in the city after everything. I’m a bit too far out of high school to go to university either, even if I had any money.”

“It’s never too late to continue your education,” Ignis pulls open the door at Prompto’s murmured request and lingers in the doorway as Prompto makes his way to the couch by the window. “You have the Crown’s support, if you need it.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Prompto reaches over the couch to pull one of his transfer boards toward him. “Just because I talked to the king once doesn’t mean anything.”

Ignis decides not to mention the way Noct’s eyes lit like they never have before just from a brief conversation with Prompto. “You can stay here as long as you wish while you decide what your next steps are.”

Prompto settles against the couch’s backrest. He pushes the transfer board down so the furthest edge rests on the floor and the closest leans against the armrest. He glances up at Ignis, who still loiters in the doorway. “You can come in for a while. If you want, I mean.”

Ignis goes to refuse, not wanting to consume the entire day of someone who may likely be entertaining his presence from a sense of debt or obligation considering their situation, but Prompto looks a little smaller the longer it takes for Ignis to respond. 

“I talked to Sir Amicitia yesterday,” Prompto announces when Ignis takes a seat on the other side of the couch. “Gladiolus, I mean.”

“Oh?” 

“Yeah,” Prompto hums. “He showed up after my dietician appointment yesterday.”

There pause is disturbed by a sudden burst of thunder. Prompto startles, his head whipping toward the window where rain begins to streak down the glass on cue. He watches it in silence, and Ignis watches him.

“So,” Prompto shakes his head as he returns from his musings. “We talked for a bit. He took me to get something to eat from the uh. That food court thing for the ‘Guard. Food hall? You know.”

“I do.”

“So, like. We go to the food hall and I’ve got my little list from the dietician, and I have no idea what he wants from me, you know? The last time we talked he was pretty close to straight up murdering me since it wasn’t like I was entirely conscious on the ride here,” Prompto exhales an odd little laugh. “So I’m there in my chair and he’s there like towering over me and I’ve got my diet plan and he looks over and he’s like ‘can I see that’ and of course I’m gonna give him the paper right? Because he could crush me like a grape. So I give him the paper and he looks at it and goes, ‘okay so here’s what you should get from here,’ and he brings me over to this restaurant and we get food and go over to one of the tables and he sits down and then he just… starts eating? So, we’re just kinda hanging out.”

Ignis keeps an eye on Prompto as he rambles, watching the way he smiles a little in the pauses between each phrase, the red that colors his cheeks when he takes a bit too long to bother taking a breath as he tells his story.

“So he’s like halfway through his food and he stops and looks at me and he’s like ‘I made a mistake’ and you know, no one ever admits that to me about shit they do so I’m like ‘wow, what the fuck’ and he starts talking about how he was like ten kinds of messed up during the Night and all that, and how he still has issues letting go of shit he learned during that. I guess that and stress over his wife —because I guess he has a wife or girlfriend or something— was part of what made him go buck wild with the whole eliminating the daemons type of thing. So I’m sitting there with my like, burrito bowl as this massive military dude who tried to kill me is getting wicked personal in the middle of this food court and I’m just,” Prompto makes a strange gesture with his hand, waving vaguely toward himself. “You know?”

Ignis blinks.

“So anyway,” Prompto concludes, “we’re friends now, I guess? Something like that. He offered to help me with my physical therapy.”

“Gladio is a good man,” Ignis says. “He is ignorant, at times. Always has been quick to anger, but his heart is true. It is understandable if you are reluctant to trust him, though.”

“Nah, he’s okay. It’s just weird.”

They sit together for a bit. Prompto draws his phone —a Crownsguard issue model he reluctantly accepted from Noctis after they got talking about a shared interest in some pre-Night phone game that Ignis can’t quite recall the name of— from his pocket and checks the time.

“Wow, it’s getting late, huh? I should probably let you go then, right?” Prompto turns the phone toward Ignis to show off the late hour. “Thanks for sticking around for a bit. I uh… I like spending time with you, if I’m. I dunno. If that’s not something weird to say.”

“It’s not weird,” Ignis assures. “We’re friends, are we not?”

⊶⊷

Ignis is awoken that night by his phone ringing. He rolls over and gropes around on his nightstand, bringing his phone to his ear without looking at the caller ID. “Ignis Scientia speaking.”

Silence. Then, quietly: “Ignis?”  
  
“Prompto?” Ignis squints down at his phone. “Is everything alright?”

“Um. Sorry, it’s late. I uh. I would have called Aranea but she’s… not in the city. You know?”

“What is it?”

“I’m not really… doing so hot right now,” Prompto sighs, the noise crackling through his phone’s mic. “I know this is stupid but could I like, uh. Well. Actually, nevermind. Forget about it. Sorry to bother you.”

The call drops.

Ignis hastily throws on some day clothes, grabs his phone, and makes his way down the hall and to the elevator.

“Late night, sir?” The guard posted at this floor’s elevator looks about dead on their feet, but they snap to proper attention anyway at Ignis’s approach.

“I suppose you could say that.”

Ignis knocks when he finds himself in front of Prompto’s door without thinking as hard about it as he ought to. 

There’s a bit of noise from behind the door but no verbal reply. Ignis waits a moment and knocks again.

No reply.

Ignis apologizes softly as he cracks the door open. The gloom behind it reveals little and no one inside the room protests at the intrusion.

Ignis opens the door a little more.

There’s a thump and drag of cloth and a wheeze of air expelled from winded lungs.

Ignis’s eyes adjust to the darkness as he steps in the room. The moon washes the edges of everything in a hazy white-grey, so much a contrast to the red-sick halos Ignis grew used to in the facility.

At the head of the bed placed flush to the far wall, Prompto is pressed to the wood with his arm crossed over his chest, his hand clutching at the far seam of his shirt. His eyes are open, but don’t follow Ignis’s crossing of the threshold.

“Why are you here?” Prompto’s voice is flat, hollow in a way Ignis has never heard— not even when he was sure Prompto was nothing more than an automaton.

“You were upset,” Ignis steps toward the bed, slow but sure.

“Just a dream,” Prompto drops his head back against the headboard, the sound of his skull hitting the solid panel reverberating through the thick quiet of the room. “I’ll be fine tomorrow.”

“You aren’t fine now.”

“Fuck no,” Prompto shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter, though.”

Ignis pauses, his hand curling on the rail at the foot of the bed. “I think it does.”

“What, you gonna move up my psychologist appointment? Surprise. Being a lab rat and a straight up MT messes you up and even after ten years I’m still not over it. I’ll go to the psychologist and then therapy next week and it’ll be fine, yeah?”

“There’s no timeline on recovery. You don’t have to be fine.”

“I know that,” Prompto’s eyes move then, flickering down from the thousand empty yards they had been staring through down to the blankets pooled beneath him. “Sorry for calling you. It was stupid.”

“What were you going to ask when you did?” Ignis discards the apology, knowing that Prompto would probably brush off any dismissal of it that Ignis would offer.

“Just, uh. That you’d come here. If you could,” Prompto mumbles his admission, the words petering off at the end. “I don’t know. I just don’t really… Aranea used to come visit me at night just in case this happened and now we’re here and she’s… not.”

“I’m here now,” Ignis offers.

“Yeah, you are,” Prompto shuffles away from the center of the bed. “Can you sit with me, for a bit? If you want. You don’t have to, really. You can go back to bed if you want.”

“I’ll stay.”

Ignis toes off his shoes and rounds the bed, testing the mattress with a hand before Prompto nods his assent to Ignis sitting down.

“I was in that armor for thirteen years,” Prompto says once Ignis settles in atop the covers. “Almost constantly, except for like… showering and all. I had to be, considering my lungs and my legs and my arm. I’m claustrophobic, you know that? I got used to it after a while but… it was pretty bad.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well. It’s… done. I just,” and Prompto holds out his hand. The barcode on the back of his wrist is dark and cleanly-lined, each bit of ink seeming stamped there by a mechanical god. Ignis stares at it until Prompto turns his hand palm-up. “This is stupid, I know but… can I…?”

Ignis takes his hand and Prompto shudders like a city on a fault line.

“I’ve nearly died at many points in my life,” Ignis says. Prompto’s hand is a little cold in his, likely from his Raynaud's syndrome flaring up. “But the closest was in Zegnautus Keep.”

“You were in Gralea?”

“Just as the Night began to fall, I found myself there,” Ignis moves a little closer to Prompto when the other pulls at him where their hands are connected. “I nearly killed myself to stop it and protect Noctis.”

When Ignis glances over, it’s to find Prompto studying his face in the faint light provided from the moon outside. Prompto flushes and turns his head away, but his gaze creeps back when Ignis begins to speak again.

“The only reason I still live is that Noctis was able to save me in my last moments. I used to dream about burning to death from the inside out every night,” Ignis manages not to startle when Prompto squeezes his hand —quickly and twice over— but repeats the motion back to Prompto’s visible comfort. “I sometimes do still, after all this time. Trauma is something that can only be recovered from, not erased. It _ can _ be recovered from, though. You will get better, especially now that you are no longer in the circumstances that hurt you and have resources at your disposal to help you.”

“Yeah,” Prompto sighs. “Thank you for uh… this. You don’t have to stay if you don’t want to.”

“I want to.”

⊶⊷

Prompto opens and closes his fist, showing off the way each tiny part of the prosthetic hand moves. “This is so much better than the MT shit.”

“The legs were built to mimic your former prostheses in terms of weight and balance to minimize the time it will take for you to complete gait training,” the head technician explains as Prompto takes a few guided steps across the floor. “The alternations are primarily aesthetic, though there are slight modifications to reduce strain on your residual limbs.”

“I think I can tell,” Prompto shifts his weight from leg to leg, frowning in concentration. “It’s not bad, though.”

The technicians advise Prompto to make an appointment with his physical therapist as soon as possible to assess his current physical capabilities. He’s directed back to a wheelchair for the time being, but he’s been moved from a motorized chair to a manual one which he settles into with a grin. He is given a quick crash course on how to maneuver in it and they’re sent on their way.

“How are you feeling?” Ignis asks as they leave the medical wing.

“Not bad,” Prompto brushes his hair from his face for what had to have been the twentieth time within the hour. “Excited to be getting this over with. I don’t miss that armor, but I sure miss walking around.”

His prosthetics are all white and matte metal and curves, clearly meant for a person and not simply repurposed limbs for a war machine. Ignis likes them —not that his opinion on the matter has any value in this case.

“Would you like to go into the city today?” Ignis asks, surprising himself.

“What?” Prompto blinks. “I mean, we could? I haven’t really been out of the Citadel yet, though. Is it okay for me to leave?”

“You’re not a prisoner here,” Ignis can’t help but smile at the reversal. “I can show you around the area after your PT appointment if you’d like.”

“That sounds nice,” Prompto nods. “Yeah, we should go out.”

⊶⊷

Prompto is cleared for walking with a cane as long as he promises to ask for help if he needs it and to return for reevaluation in a few days’ time. He takes to this with great enthusiasm, hurrying along aside Ignis as they take their leave from the Citadel and are waved through the gates. 

“Where would you like to go?”

“Well,” Prompto’s head whips around, taking in the sights of a city rebuilding. “I’m not really sure what’s left.”

“Most of the restoration has been focused on the residential areas near the citadel, though a stretch of the Sasa Yuri neighborhood has been converted into a public market,” Ignis points to the east, where the very top of Sasa Yuri’s tallest habitable building still stands over its counterparts. “We could go there if you’d like.”  
“That sounds great,” Prompto takes off down the road in the indication direction, quickly outpacing Ignis. “What kind of things do they sell there?”

Ignis explains the ins and outs of the market as they walk, showing Prompto a few pictures on his phone of hauls Noctis had excitedly sent to him the few times he went shopping there incognito after sneaking out under the nose of his acting guard at the time. If Ignis remembers correctly, there is a large scale flea market event happening today, and Prompto becomes enraptured with imagining what may be available.

“Oh,” Prompto says as the enter the neighborhood proper. “I don’t have any money.”  
“Well,” Ignis has several gil notes that Noctis pushed into his hands earlier when Ignis gave him his evening reports and mentioned where he would be off to afterward, urging him to treat Prompto to something he would like. “There’s nothing wrong with window shopping, is there?”

Ignis leaves the market that night several gil lighter and Prompto walks away with his cane clutched in his left hand and several bags in his right, filled with vintage clothing and a slightly battered handheld game console he had told Ignis he once owned as a kid.

“You really didn’t have to do all this for me,” Prompto mumbles as they slowly climb the stairs into the Citadel. He had been walking slower the longer the evening went on, and was depending on his cane more. The red light on the portable generator clipped to his belt pulsed softly.

“I didn’t,” Ignis replies. He had dipped into his own savings to cover the game console, and hasn’t a lick of regret about it. “I’m glad I did, though.”

⊶⊷

As time goes on, Ignis spends more time in Prompto’s room after his nightmares. Eventually he started keeping a spare set of both day and night clothes in a drawer in Prompto’s dresser for the nights he wouldn’t return to his own room before the sun rose.

“Hey,” Prompto breaks a long silence that had been held between the two of them. Tonight, Ignis lays under the covers with Prompto edged close to his chest. They discovered that the contact helped Prompto a lot when all he could think about was being separated from the world by cold metal. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“You don’t have to like… feel pressured or anything. So don’t feel bad if the answer is no, okay? I won’t mind. I get it, y’know?”

Ignis turns his head to meet Prompto’s eyes. “What is it?”

“So, I don’t know if I’m reading the room very wrong here or what, but uh… I was wondering if maybe you wanted to… go out with me?”

Ignis takes a moment. “Go out with you?”

“Yeah,” Prompto blushes and averts his gaze, which doesn’t quite have the minimizing effect he was likely going for considering the fact that he’s practically being held in Ignis’s arms. “I like you. I know that we’ve had a really rocky… everything, starting off with, but I was wondering if there was any chance you, uh… liked me too, I guess. Gods, I sound like a kid.”

Ignis would be lying if he said he hasn’t thought about it. The long nights spent in the same bed tend to do that to a man, even if he hadn’t become somewhat enamoured with watching the way Prompto grew into himself the longer he was free from the facility and its trappings. So he looks at Prompto, newly-cut hair and freckled cheeks and red-rimmed eyes from another sleepless night, and lays his head on Prompto’s shoulder.

“I won’t say I’m in love,” Ignis says, because committing to a word like that after so short a time knowing another man is hardly the sort of thing that he does, especially not when his life is held in the bounds of royal obligation, but… “But I want to try with you.”

**END**

**Author's Note:**

> Tale as old as time /
> 
> Song as old as rhyme...
> 
> You can see Niscuit-Gravy's art for the fic outside of its embedded appearance [here](https://twitter.com/NiscuitG/status/1196656430318637056).
> 
> Follow me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/compromisedunit).


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